Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I want that Sinatra type of fame. It's not the 'Whoever's the hot pop star at the moment' fame. It's the 'Walk into a room and everybody just kind of politely nods their heads' fame. Sinatra fame.
My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.
I don't have an iPod. I don't get the whole iPod thing. Who has time to listen to that much music? If I had one, it would probably have Sinatra, Beatles, some '70s music, some '80s music, and that's it.
You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.
I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you're having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional - old Frank Sinatra and things like that.
I worked with practically everybody in the business in all of the years in NBC, but I worked personally many years with people like Crosby and Sinatra, so of course that was a great ground school for me.
When Sinatra said, 'For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer I've ever heard,' it changed my career completely. He was my best friend, and I was his best friend... but I was never part of the Rat Pack.
Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.
If someone had told me when I was a kid I'd get an ovation from Frank Sinatra! One time, I did a song called 'I Am A Singer', but I rewrote the words for Frank. I was in tears and, when he got up, so was he.
When I was in my formative years, I rejected Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Dean Martin. I now realise they were all great artists, but at the time, as a young man, you have to clear the decks.
Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media technology - the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness.
I've been fortunate that when Frank Sinatra was in concert, he would say, 'Here's a song by a wonderful young songwriter, Jimmy Webb,' and I'd be in the front row and stand up. That gets people talking about you.
I don't think it's ever changed, whether its Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Zeppelin, Guns n' Roses or anyone today, the reason why you get into music is because you love it, and if you're good at it, that's a plus.
My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.
When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
I remember a show in New Jersey several years ago when a big fight broke out in the crowd. I took the microphone and introduced Frank Sinatra. He wasn't there, but even the guys creating the disturbance stopped to look.
Frank Sinatra was a great singer, but my favourite is Sammy Davis Jr. He had incredible versatility in his voice, often doing impressions of people. It's always going to be classic, and you'll never get bored listening.
I couldn't get away from the gramophone. It was the only thing that I ever really liked, and I was singing along by the time I was five years old - to the Modernaires and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.
No one controlled Frank Sinatra or told him how to sing. No secret group of managers has been telling someone like Jay-Z what to do or how to look. And no one tells me what to do except me and the people who believe in me.
The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.
Rob Thomas, the Action Bronson and the Riff Raff. Both the musicians, they know who I am and they know I come from oldest country in the world and if I want my words like the music. I forever love them like the Frank Sinatra.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
The thing is that my idols have always been the types of guys who could do anything: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Sinatra, Dean Martin; and when you look up to people like that, you don't accept that you need to be compartmentalised.
Here's the mark that a lot of people miss nowadays. Producers missed. They leave out the heart and soul. And that's what I learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., from Frank Sinatra, is when you went to go see those shows, you got to know them.
I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.
Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.
Frank Sinatra discovered me at a nightclub called P.J.'s in Hollywood. It was 1962. He used to come in there a lot with all his big star friends. I was so nervous to see him. I've only had one idol in my life, and that was Frank Sinatra.
Frank Sinatra changed people's approach to singing. Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, van Gogh, they were all part of movements that allowed people to think about their craft differently. They changed the game. These people changed the game.
I want to be known as a triple threat. I have aspirations to win an Oscar and a Grammy, and I also want to win a Tony. I want to be one of those guys like Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr. that crossed all those barriers of entertainment.
We grew up listening to a variety of music, such as Gospel/Christian, R&B old/new school, jazz, blues, Mozart, Mary Poppins, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, just to name a few. I love opera, too - went to state in high school as a soloist.
There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.
My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority.
I'm awful at karaoke, but if I did have to sing, I'd go for my favourite Frank Sinatra song 'I've Got You Under My Skin.' The fact I love Frank is my grandfather's doing: he drummed it into me from a very early age that Frank Sinatra is God.
I know there are a lot of tough stories out there about Sinatra, but he was so sweet to Bobby and me. He even had us replace him one night in the main room. He didn't get Sammy or Dean; he said, 'I want the kids to do it.' Man, what an honor.
Frank Sinatra did 'Born Free', Tony Bennett did 'Walkabout,' but you have no control over who does what, really. So you just hold yourself responsible for the stuff you do, and then get filthy rich on all this stuff that other people have done.
I've learned that people latch onto labels and stereotypes. There was a period when I was asked in every single interview how I liked being the new Frank Sinatra... I think people will soon realize that I do a lot more than interpret old songs.
Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, I have no regrets in my life. Zero. Whatever hardships I have faced, or have caused myself, are moments I have to embrace in order to move forward. I have no problem coming to grips with either the highs or lows in my life.
No press conference announcing a last film. I'd just steal away. Best way because, if by chance after two or three years something interesting comes up, I would not - like Sinatra - have to say: 'Well, I've thought it over and decided to come back.'
Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World' is my ultimate karaoke song. It is a wonderful world. People forget we only have a certain amount of time, and it can all end at any moment. Armstrong and Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' are the ultimate one-two punch.
Sinatra had a lot of mood swings, but he was wonderful to my wife Barbara and to me. He made no bones about who he liked and who he loved, and he had this great charisma. When he walked into a room, it stopped. I've only seen that happen with Ronald Reagan.
When I was a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, my parents and their friends would play the records of Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, music with string arrangements and men singing songs that sounded sad whether they were or not.
Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.
The thing is when you play a character it's the persona you bring across from a book to film, or book to script to film. If I play Frank Sinatra, there's gonna be things I do in a movie that Frank might not have done, but it's the personality that comes across.
When we first went to L.A., Howard Koch, who was the head of Paramount Pictures and later President of the Oscars, threw a welcome lunch for us at his house. There were all these stars there - Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Lucille Ball, Natalie Wood, Henry Mancini.
I knew Sinatra for 38 years. He was like my father. Frank Sinatra was my 'dad.' He treated me like his son. He gave me the best advice about singing, about this and that... He was a very sensitive man, very astute, one of the sharpest men that I ever met in my life.
Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man now! Where are they?
I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn't necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn't ever really seen before.
Well, I met Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan in the space of 15 minutes. Frank Sinatra kissed me on the lips. He kissed me on the lips. And then he gave me a filterless cigarette. And then I met Bob Dylan. I came off all lightheaded and had to go sit on his dressing-room steps.